Killing it in Yahoo/Bing...Sucking it in Google. What gives?
-
Our website http://www.survive-a-storm.com has historically performed well in Google for the search terms "storm shelters" and "tornado shelters." Our geographic focus is nationwide, but we are particularly interested in ranking up for Oklahoma.
Right now we are hovering at about the third position in Yahoo/Bing, and in some geographic areas (i.e., as selected in Google's search settings) we are doing reasonably to quite well for these terms in Google (i.e., first page).
In Oklahoma, though, we are holding steady around positions 20-25. We have just changed the title tag on our home page, cleaned up a bit of on-page optimization, and are going to work on getting some more optimized content on the page.
We are outperforming the competition on Domain Authority (38) and Page Authority (46), and as far as I can tell, other key metrics are respectable. Our social isn't bad, but could always use improvement--which we are working on.
Any idea why we might be lagging so badly in Google? Any help would be appreciated!
-
Hi Audra,
You've categorized your question as a local question, and in visiting your website, I see you have 4 physical locations listed, though precedence is being given to your location in Thomasville, GA, the partial NAP of which appears in the footer of the website.
It's important to understand that, of all of the search engines, Google has the most sophisticated approach to how it assesses and displays local businesses. Right now, the Local SEO of your website is not being handled properly and my guess is that it is thus not sending the proper signals to Google to achieve the visibility you'd love to achieve.
I can't provide a full audit here, within the scope of Q&A, but I can point out a few quick things to you.
1). Your footer has a section labeled 'Our Locations', listing the names of 4 cities in 4 states. Yet, within the footer, the only NAP being provided is for the Thomasville location. And, that Thomasville NAP is only partial.
-
Your NAP would be deemed 'partial', because the Thomasville, GA, location is being listed with a toll free number instead of a local one. Local SEO revolves around local area code phone numbers. So, we don't have complete NAP for this location, and when I visit the 4 location landing pages by clicking on the links in the footer, none of these are listing complete NAP either. In fact, there is no mention of a phone number at all on these pages. These pages are not giving Google the signals they expect and need.
-
There is nothing in the footer to indicate that Oklahoma is of premium importance to the company. Despite the fact that you've optimized the title tag of the homepage to mention Oklahoma, what Google is finding in the footer would signal to them that Georgia is really your most important location.
So, there are discrepancies and missing data here. You need to have a unique local area code phone number for each unique physical office you occupy. Seeing the way the site is set up, I am wondering how the company has handled its Local SEM, in general, especially in terms of the development of Google+ Local pages and citation building. Without those local phone numbers, the company's hands are tied in Google Land and you're unlikely to achieve the visibility you desire without complying with Google's basic standards for local businesses.
If the company has not hired a Local SEO to consult with previously, I would highly suggest finding a top tier one who can dig into the site and the off-site Local SEM that's been done and to analyze problems and develop a marketing strategy. There are about 20 questions for which answers are needed and, hopefully, by consulting with a pro on this, you can discover both your issues and your opportunities.
Hope this helps!
-
-
Thanks, Jane (and Eric, too):
We haven't actively made any effort to build links, so we haven't actively been doing anything that would attract undesirable backlinks. I guess we'll have to comb through and maybe disavow any that are questionable.
Wouldn't any sort of penalty affect rankings more-or-less uniformly, though? That is why I was leaning toward social/local to explain the disparity in performance from one geographical location to another.
Thanks for the assist!
-
Hi Audra,
Eric is right - it's generally easier to rank in Bing, with its engine behaving somewhat like we remember Google being a few years ago. The standard for links is a little lower, and if you have questionable links in your backlink profile, you're unlikely to get away with it in Google the way you can in other engines. It's not uncommon to see results like this, so I'd start looking closely at your backlinks and perhaps look at taking down those that potentially violate Webmaster Guidelines.
-
Audra,
One of the big differences between Bing and Google is how they deal with links. Google analyzes links to your site a lot more than Bing does, and is "pickier" when it comes to the types of links and how they're obtained. I would review all of the links to your website and make sure that they're all "high quality" links. A quick analysis of the links to your site shows some undesirable links pointing to the site that violate Google's webmaster guidelines.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to Get 1st Page Google Rankings for a Local Company?
Hi guys, I'm owning a London removal company - Mega Removals and wants to achieve 1st page rankings on Google UK for keywords like: "removals London", "removal company London", "house removals London" but have no success so far. I need professional advice on how to do it. Should I hire an SEO or should focus on content? I will be very grateful for your help.
Local Website Optimization | | nanton1 -
How to use canonical tags/hreflang for a company in multiple English-speaking countries?
My company is a global company with locations in AU, UK, and USA. Each has their own website. For example, we have https://www.catskill.us (for the USA), a https://www.catskill.com.au (for the AU), and https://www.catskill.co.uk (for the UK). I have used both canonical tags and hreflang tags for our USA website to distinguish any duplicate content from our AU and UK websites. I am wondering if I used the canonical tags and hreflang tags appropriatley in the below example for our USA website. Is it the best way to avoid link value loss? | |
Local Website Optimization | | joseph.defranco
| | |
| | |
| | |0 -
Google for Jobs: how to deal with third-party sites that appear instead of your own?
We have shared our company's job postings on several third-party websites, including The Muse, as well as putting the job postings on our own website. Our site and The Muse have about the same schema markup except for these differences: The Muse...
Local Website Optimization | | Kevin_P
• Lists Experience Requirements
• Uses HTML in the description with tags and other markup (our website just has plain text)
• Has a Name in JobPosting
• URL is specific to the position (our website's URL just goes to the homepage)
• Has a logo URL for Organization When you type the exact job posting's title into Google, The Muse posting shows up in Google for Jobs--not our website's duplicate copy. The only way to see our website's job posting is to type in the exact job title plus "site:http://www.oursite.com". What is a good approach for getting our website's posting to be the priority in Google for Jobs? Do we need to remove postings from third-party sites? Structure them differently? Do organic factors affect which version of the job posting is shown, and if so, can I assume that our site will face challenges outranking a big third-party site?1 -
How to correctly move subdomain to subfolder (google webmaster)?
Hello, This is my first post in here 🙂 I just wondered what is the correct way to move a subdomain to subfolder? I've moved it, re-done sitemap, so that main website would include a subfolder, as they are part of one big website now (it was something like a blog on a subdomain). Subdomain now does correct 301 redirects. Submitted new sitemap to google, asked google to re-fetch the whole domain (thus subfolder should be re-fetched too, as it's part of main nav). The areas i'm in doubt: I can tell google that the domain got moved, however it is moved to the one that is already approved in the same account, but is in a subfolder, so should i do this? Or should i simply somehow erase it on webmaster? The blog was launched about a month ago, and it isn't perfectly optimized yet, it wasn't on google SERPs pretty much at all, excluding googling it straightly, and there are pretty much 0 traffic from google, almost all of it is either direct either referral, mostly social, Thanks, Pavel
Local Website Optimization | | PavelGro920 -
Google my business - Image sizes
I have scoured the web in order to find a guide that would give me the ideal dimensions for images to populate google my business page... in vain. Google itself is very vague about it as indicated below Format: JPG, PNG, TIFF, BMP Size: Between 10 KB and 5 MB Minimum resolution: 250px tall, 250px wide Does anyone know of a guide with optimum recommendation for each photo (profile, Cover photo, business specific photos...) or alternatively can recommend the exact size needed. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | coolhandluc0 -
Subdomain for ticketing of a client website (how to solve SEO problems caused by the subdomain/domain relationship)
We have a client in need of a ticketing solution for their domain (let's call it www.domain.com) which is on Wordpress - as is our custom ticket solution. However, we want to have full control of the ticketing, since we manage it for them - so we do not want to build it inside their original Wordpress install. Our proposed solution is to build it on tickets.domain.com. This will exist only for selling and issuing the tickets. The question is, is there a way to do this without damaging their bounce rate and SEO scores?
Local Website Optimization | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing
Since customers will come to www.domain.com, then click the ticketing tab and land on tickets.domain.com, Google will see this as a bounce. In reality, customers will not notice the difference as we will clone the look and feel of domain.com Should we perhaps have the canonical URL of tickets.domain.com point to www.domain.com? And also, can we install Webmaster Tools for tickets.domain.com and set the preferred domain as www.domain.com? Are these possible solutions to the problem, or not - and if not, does anyone else have a viable solution? Thank you so much for the help.0 -
How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis9 -
Does Google play fair? Is 'relevant content' and 'usability' enough?
It seems there are 2 opposing views, and as a newbie this is very confusing. One view is that as long as your site pages have relevant content and are easy for the user, Google will rank you fairly. The other view is that Google has 'rules' you must follow and even if the site is relevant and user-friendly if you don't play by the rules your site may never rank well. Which is closer to the truth? No one wants to have a great website that won't rank because Google wasn't sophisticated enough to see that they weren't being unfair. Here's an example to illustrate one related concern I have: I've read that Google doesn't like duplicated content. But, here are 2 cases in which is it more 'relevant' and 'usable' to the user to have duplicate content: Say a website helps you find restaurants in a city. Restaurants may be listed by city region, and by type of restaurant. The home page may have links to 30 city regions. It may also have links for 20 types of restaurants. The user has a choice. Say the user chooses a region. The resulting new page may still be relevant and usable by listing ALL 30 regions because the user may want to choose a different region. Altenatively say the user chooses a restaurant type for the whole city. The resulting page may still be relevant and usable by giving the user the ability to choose another type OR another city region. IOW there may be a 'mega-menu' at the top of the page which duplicates on every page in the site, but is very helpful. Instead of requiring the user to go back to the home page to click a new region or a new type the user can do it on any page. That's duplicate content in the form of a mega menu, but is very relevant and usable. YET, my sense is that Google MAY penalize the site even though arguably it is the most relevant and usable approach for someone that may or may not have a specific region or restaurant type in mind.. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | couponguy0